Archive of Our Own ^beta

We've made it another year! As part of the OTW October Membership Drive, we thought we'd share some of the stats and growth over the last two years, and a breakdown of the tags on the Archive.

Warning right up front: this post is very graphics-heavy.

Overall tag growth and canonical growth

Overall, our growth has (inevitably) been nothing but up. There has been proportional growth between the number of works and number of unique tags over the last two years. In October 2010, there were 107,430 works on the Archive and 105,750 unique tags; in October 2012, there are 459,655 works and 395,099 unique tags. The number of canonical tags (the ones which come up in the autocomplete and filters), however, scaled up much more slowly: from 55,697 in October 2010 to 140,306 in October 2012. This reflects the fact that the AO3 tagging system is designed to give creators as much freedom as possible in how they tag their works, so while the arrival of a new fandom on the Archive might generate only a few new canonical tags so the fandom name and characters can come up in filters, there might be a whole host of non-canonical synonyms reflecting the different preferences of creators.

Ratings

For these next few categories, we don't have a historical comparison.

The greatest number of our works - just over 31% - are tagged "Teen and Up", with "General Audiences" close behind at just under 30%. "Explicit" works make up roughly 18% of the Archive, and "Mature", 16%. Roughly 5% of the works are "Not Rated".

Warnings

Unlike Ratings, Warnings are non-exclusive: a work can have multiple warnings. The vast majority of works on the Archive - almost two in three - are tagged "No Archive Warnings Apply". Around a quarter of the works are tagged "Author chose not to use warnings." "Major Character Death" has roughly 18,000 works; "Graphic Depictions of Violence" has 17,000; "Underage" has around 10,000; and "Rape/Non-con" is tagged on just over 8,600 works.

Categories

Like Warnings, Categories are also non-exclusive. Roughly four in nine of the 460,000 on the Archive are tagged "M/M", making up the largest Category by far. "Gen" has roughly 125,000 works, and "F/M" has just under 100,000 works. The other three categories are much rarer with 23,000 works or fewer.

Tags by type, 2011 - 2012

All User-generated Tags

The following two graphs show the month-by-month growth of total unique tags and canonical tags on the Archive, with the vertical bars broken up for each type of tag.

The unique tags have a linear growth from the 105,000 tags on 01 October 2010 until around December 2011, then they start showing a slight upward curve to their increase, to a current total of just under 400,000 unique tags on the Archive. Characters and Relationships are almost as large a percentage of the total tags as Freeforms (aka Additional Tags).

The canonical tags, on the other hand, are maintaining a roughly linear increase, from 56,000 in October 2010 to today's 140,000. Proportionally, characters comprise the majority of canonicals, followed closely by Relationships. Freeform canonicals are roughly as common as Fandom canonicals. (Reasons for this can be seen in our Freeform Wrangling Guidelines.)

Fandoms

Fandoms have had a very consistent growth, with a notable bump in unique tags in May 2012, when many new users imported existing works from other sites. The number of canonical tags roughly follows this increase, but has been slowing down in recent months. 50% of the 14,000 Fandom tags were canonical in October 2011, decreasing slightly to 43% of the 23,000 unique tags in October 2012.

Characters

We can see a similar pattern with the Character tags - a linear increase in unique tags, and a slowing down of canonical tags. The increases aren't proportional, however: while almost 74% of the 72,000 character tags were canonical in October 2011, only 57% of the 114,000 tags are canonical in October 2012. This may reflect a greater diversity of fannish terminologies being contributed by newer users of the site.

Relationships

Relationship tags also show the same linear growth as the other two, with a slight decrease in the number of canonical tags. Due to the ever-climbing number of combinations, these increased more proportionally: in October 2011, canonicals were 47% of the 68,000 relationship tags; in 2012, they're only 44% of the 118,000 tags.

Additionals

In what should not be a surprise, the majority of growth in unique tags comes from the unique Additional tags (also called Freeform tags). The number of freeforms has increased along an increasing slope from 43,000 last October to 138,000 this October. However, as the vast majority of freeforms entered are not intended for searching and indexing, far fewer have been marked canonical: there were just under 9,000 canonical freeforms in October 2011, and there are only 11,500 canonical freeforms in October 2012, as most freeform wrangling consists of glancing at a list and picking out the ones that would be useful as canonical tags (for example, common terms such as 'Angst').

Last Words

We always enjoy taking a look at stats, and tags are particularly interesting because they often give a snapshot of different fannish communities or traditions. We love the way different communities of users on the Archive take advantage of our unique tag system to tag in all kinds of different ways!

The growth in tags reflects the massive increase in the number of users on the site. If you're enjoying using the AO3 and you'd like to help with our running costs, please consider donating to our parent Organization for Transformative Works. Donations help fund the AO3 and all the OTW's other cool projects!

A note on tag filters

In any post about tags, we know people will want to ask about tag filters. We know that the Archive is much harder to browse without this feature, and we're sorry it's taking us a long time to restore it - the rewrite is a significant piece of work. The good news is that we're so close now we can almost taste it - the new filters are on our Test Archive and if testing goes well they should be rolled out to the main site in a few weeks time. Wish us luck!

This is going to be a very boring post. It's going to be full of numbers, and graphs, those things that I may or may not have spent many years at school colouring in with lovely coloured pencil without understanding them much (because I was apparently too much of an innocent mind to turn them into rude, crude approximations of things not related to mathematics except in the most abstract sense), and yet, these will be very easy to understand numbers. I am not a statistician, nor are the levels of data I have access to very deep. What I am is a member of the Support Committee with a curiosity about the numbers and types of tickets that pass through our hands, and who decided to add up the numbers one day and turn them into graphs. That was last year, and somehow the lure of the bar chart means that I have continued to collate information through to where we are right now, having just finished the second quarter of 2012.

In this post, I'm going to summarise the types of tickets received, what categories they fall under, and the general trends we witness. But first, some explanation of the process.

Collecting The Numbers

I'm sure that the method I have used is going to come under some degree of criticism for being inefficient; however, our Support software, provided by 16bugs (see Sam's spotlight post for more information) was not designed for data export. This means that the only way to extract numbers of tickets is to do it manually. And by manually, I mean I go through the email duplicates of each ticket one by one, assigning them a category, then add up the numbers for each month and enter them into an Excel spreadsheet.

What this method is, for all its faults, is quick, which means that I can rapidly pull up a given time period to see what sort of tickets were received between those dates. These graphs were originally created as an informal overview of ticket stats (which is a position they remain in – production of these stats is not an official Support Committee duty). They are simply counts of the original tickets, what they are about, and when they were received. They are not a count of how quickly they were responded to, who responded to what, or what follow ups were conducted with the users.

Categories

I'm going to leave direct explanations of the categories until the sections for the respective quarters, as these change on a quarter-by-quarter basis. This is due to the simple fact that new features are added, which generates new issues, and old issues are resolved. For example, squid caching was not implemented until June of this year, so prior to that, it was not shown in the graphs because issues relating to it did not occur. Here I'll instead explain the process by which tickets are categorised.

If you've ever submitted a comment or query to Support you will notice that on our form is a drop down menu.

These categories are not the ones I have used to sort tickets. Since the categories in the menu are so few and so broad, I felt it necessary to granulate them further, and count tickets as they related to specific archive functions and features.

If a new category is created in my sorting, it's because an issue got a large number of tickets and wasn't a transient bug. For example, if a ticket is related to subscription emails, it is categorised under "Subscriptions", not "Email" because it is related to a specific Archive function (in this case subscriptions) that has an existing category. If it were related to invitation emails, it would go under "Accounts/Invitations/Login". However, if it's related to kudos batching, it goes under general "Emails", because there is no category for kudos.

The Stats

2011, In Brief

I won't linger on 2011 too much (see Q1 2012 for an explanation of categories), since this information was a little more awkwardly hacked together than for 2012 – by which time I had sorted out my process for quickly organising tickets.

Prior to August, tickets were collated by the Support Chair, using slightly different categories than I did. I attempted to meld the two sets of information as best I could to produce the above year overview.

What is easily and clearly visible is the spike in tickets in November, resulting from a change to the front-end presentation of the AO3. The biggest spike is split between Interface/CSS tickets and Feedback. While many of the tickets sorted under Feedback were directly related to the changes to the AO3's interface, they did not contain bug reports or requests for information, and therefore fell under the heading of Feedback.

Q1 2012

Categories for Q1 2012:

• Error 502 - the 'server busy' messages
• 1000 Works - queries related to why we have a 1000 work limit on the fandom landing pages
• Activation/Invitation/Login - problems activating accounts, getting invitations, or logging in
• Admin/Abuse - issues that need to be examined by Admin or Abuse teams
• Bug Report - Reports of transient bugs that aren't separately categorised
• Collection/Challenges/Prompts - any problems/queries about these
• Downloads - errors, bugs, queries related to downloading
• Feature Request - any 'can I have/I would like/will you implement' queries
• Feedback - any complaints, or any positive feedback (alone with no other feature-related issue)
• Help/Information - any questions about AO3/OTW in general, or how to use specific features
• Interface/CSS/Display - problems/queries relating to how the archive appears on screen, i.e. interface
• Imports - issues with importing from LiveJournal/Fanfiction.net/other
• Open Doors - questions related to fics imported through OD
• Search/Browse/Filter - Problem or queries about sorting through archive contents
• Tag Wrangling - any tag related questions

Possibly due to the fact that the holidays are still going on at the beginning of January (and thus, people have more time to spend on fandom sites) we saw more tickets in general than during the following two months.

Q2 2012

Categories added for Q2 2012:

• Embedding – queries/problems with embedding media (images/audio/video) into Works pages
• Bookmarks – queries/problems involving bookmarking
• Caching – bug reports that are actually caching issues (e.g., reporting 0 works in a fandom as a bug – this is a caching issue, or appearing as logged in as another user). The kind of caching which causes these particular bugs was only implemented in June.
• Email – email issues unrelated to other categories (e.g., kudos email batching)
• Subscriptions – issues/queries to do with the subscribe feature

To break down the invitations emails, in June we received 140 tickets related to Invitations.

• How Do I Use This Invite: 22
• Did Not Receive Invitation Email: 31
• Fell Off Invite List (unaware of security changes): 41
• (of those, who admitted to re-adding themselves: 6)
• General Invite Queue Unhappiness: 10
• Can I have An Invite?: 9
• I Requested Invites, Where Are They?: 12
• Paid Accounts: 3
• My friend on FF.net needs an invite: 12
• Need Invites for a Challenge: 5
• Please Remove Me From Queue: 1

The remaining 37 tickets in that category were related to account activation or login issues.

This graph shows how the tickets were distributed during the weeks that span the month of June. In week 23 (commencing 4th June) we received the greatest number of queries regarding invites, as this was the point at which the invitations queue started growing at the rate of nearly 1000 new additions per day (a rate since slowed to around 300-odd per day). This coincided with the point at which the AO3 servers started creaking under the strain of lots more visitors and a filtering system that was originally designed with a smaller user base in mind.

When squid caching was implemented to help ease the strain (around week 24) we saw an increased number of tickets related to this change. In week 25, when filtering was disabled, we began to see an increased number of tickets related to that. (Originally, the message was ill-worded, appearing to be an error message, rather than an admin message – this has since been altered, and tickets regarding the filtering being 'down' have disappeared.)

And This All Means...

I always have fun posting these stats to the support committee. Everyone already knows more-or-less how things have gone, but sometimes looking at the numbers surprises us. When I originally created them, one frequent question was "what's the most common ticket you get" to which we would generally reply "queries regarding the 1000 work limit". I was curious as to whether this was actually the case. As it turned out, Feature Requests came in more often. Questions about the 1000 Works came lower down the list.

If you are wondering how many tickets we answer altogether, I can tell you that at the time of writing there are no unanswered tickets in our support software (except for one bugged ticket, which we are attempting to resolve with 16 Bugs). Every single ticket we receive is read and personally answered by a member of our staff, usually within a day or two. So, the answer is: we answer all of them.

This post by Support staffer Yshyn. If you find a bug, have a question about the site, or want to request a feature, you can submit a Support request.

We've been talking a lot recently about how much the AO3 has expanded over the last few months. One easy statistic for us to lay our hands on is the number of registered accounts, but this only represents a tiny portion of site activity. Our awesome sys-admin James_ has been doing some number crunching with our server logs to establish just how much we've grown, and provided us with the following stats (numbers for June not yet available). Thanks to hele for making them into pretty graphs!

Visitors to the AO3

The number of unique visitors to the site has increased almost every month since December 2010 (each unique IP address is counted as one visitor). There are a few points where the rate of increase gets more dramatic: there was a jump of 244,587 across December 2011 and January 2012, compared to one of 137,917 over the two months before that. This can probably be accounted for by the fact that during December and January, holiday challenges such as Yuletide bring more people to the site. This theory is borne out by the fact there was a slight dip in the number of visitors during February 2012, indicating that some of the extra traffic in the previous two months were 'drive by' visitors who didn't stick around.

May 2012 saw a steep increase in the number of visitors: there were 211,628 more visitors to the site than there had been the month before! The rapid increase in visitors was not without its price: this was the month of many 502 errors!

Traffic to the AO3

The increase in the number of visitors to the site has also been accompanied by an increase in overall site traffic (how much data we're serving up). Again, there's a significant spike during December/January. Interestingly, there's no dip in traffic for February 2012, showing that even though there were some 'one time' visitors over the holiday period, there were also plenty of people who stayed and continued to enjoy fanworks on the site.

The increase in traffic to the site clearly accelerated in 2012. Between January and May 2011 traffic increased by just 159.92 GB; the same period in 2012 saw an increase of 1,870.26 GB! In fact, with an increase of 566 GB during May 2012, that month alone saw almost as big a jump in traffic as the whole of the previous year (595.63GB)!

And the other stuff

With these kinds of numbers, it's not surprising that there've been a few bumps along the way. For information on how we're dealing with the growth in the site you can check out our posts on performance and growth and accounts and invitations.

Many thanks to our dedicated volunteers for their hard work dealing with the growth of the site, and to our fabulous users for their patience with our growing pains - and for creating the awesome fanworks so many people are flocking here to see!

2011 was an amazing year for the Archive of Our Own, and we wanted to take a moment to look back and to thank everyone involved, including all of our users and volunteers! AO3 started its open beta about two years ago, towards the end of 2009. That year, we were really still putting the pieces together, building out the core functionality. In 2010, we started to pick up more momentum with people posting their works and archiving their older fic and art. We added gift exchange challenge hosting, kudos, downloads and skins. This year, we've done a lot of work on site performance and infrastructure, usability improvements, and new features like subscriptions and prompt meme challenges. We're looking forward to expanding on that next year and continuing to build a great, stable home for all kinds of fanworks!

Traffic and performance

At the beginning of the year, we moved to a new and bigger set of servers, which gave the site some much-needed room to grow. Our systems team made some tweaks along the way, ensuring that we were getting the best performance out of the new setup. We started using Redis, which is super-fast, for email queues, autocompletes and other background tasks, which took some of the load off our main database. And even with all the work we were doing, it was tough to keep up with how fast the site was growing! 2/3rds of our current registered users signed up this year, and we kept giving out more and more invitations through our invite queue, but the numbers kept climbing - there were over 2,000 people on the waiting list for several months. (We've finally gotten that down now, just by sending out even more as the system could handle it.) And many more site visitors aren't registered users - we now get well over half a million unique visitors each month and there have been 24+ million pageviews in December. We now get as much traffic on an average day as we did last year during Yuletide, which at the time was a huge traffic spike. The period around Christmas, with Yuletide and other holiday exchanges going live, still represents a noticeable jump in traffic, but the difference isn't as great which means more stable site performance. (\o/ We were standing by with fingers crossed just in case, but we were thrilled that no last-minute work was required this year!)

Fun with charts!

AO3 is currently home to over 8,100 fandoms, 31,000 users and 275,000 works! Here's a graph of work, chapter, bookmark and comment posting over the last three years:

You can see that work posting is up this year, but what's much more dramatic is the increase in reading, bookmarking and commenting. There have also been more multi-chapter works and works-in-progress posted this year, which is exciting. And one of the neat features the archive has is the ability to go back and see what you've read or viewed, for registered users who have it enabled. Here's how that looks year-to-year:

Lots of people viewing lots of stuff! There have also been almost 1.5 million kudos left since last year, so there's been no shortage of love to go around. <3

What's on deck for 2012

In the short term, we have a new release coming out hopefully early this month, and that will include improvements to our HTML parser (yay!), some exciting new subscription options and a variety of bugfixes. There are also a ton of other features and improvements that we've been developing this year that we hope to have ready for you in 2012, including the ability to view the site in other languages, art hosting, an on-site support area and a wealth of browsing, filtering and email improvements for both works and bookmarks. We also hope to start a series of international fandom spotlights in January and solicit more input from users about upcoming features.

Kudos!

And finally: thank you! Thanks to all of the authors, artists, and vidders who have posted their works, to the mods who organize challenges and collections, to those who have shared skins for customizing the site, to everyone who creates bookmarks and leaves comments and kudos, encouraging authors and artists and making it easier for other fans to find awesome works. Thanks to everyone for bearing with our growing pains earlier in the year and for supporting AO3 financially, enabling it to continue operating and improving. And many thanks, as always, to everyone who volunteers their time wrangling tags, writing code, testing the site, handling support requests, and maintaining our systems, and also to everyone who's left comments and written in to our support team with feedback, suggestions, and bug reports, all of which are incredibly valuable! The archive is very much a community effort, and it couldn't exist without all of us working together and supporting one another.

We have, courtesy of time passing and the lovely Elz who has magical powers over the AO3 database, some delicious statistics to share with you.

The short version: Commenting is increasing and kudos is popular. :D

The kudos feature was introduced in December 2010 (15th December to be precise) and we're delighted to see it being used with enthusiasm. In fact, 62,742 kudos were given over the course of March, and over 200,000 have been left since the feature was introduced. Hurrah!

There was some discussion of how kudos affected commenting (and if it did at all) so we've done some digging and here are our observations.

• Works are being added at a steady rate. These works are from existing Users (steady growth) and also from new Users (erratic growth as new Users tend to upload their back catalogues when they create their accounts). Since we invite people at a steady rate the erratic growth gets 'smoothed' (at present this number is set to 50 per day and there are 97 requests in the queue).
• Comments are being added at variable rates. The rate of commenting over the last year was reasonably steady until December 2010 where it rose sharply – we attribute this to Yuletide. Once the Yuletide MADNESS was over, the rate dropped back down to something resembling 'normal' levels.
• Kudos is being added at a steady rate. The amount of kudos added is exciting! It's probably a bit early to be making assumptions about what 'normal' kudosifying looks like but look at that little yellow line shooting up!

Total Comments, Works and Kudos added starting from April 2010

*This is not the Total Works in the AO3; this is one year's data.

'Total' charts are great for looking at broad trends, but not so great for looking at more subtle differences so next we looked a little more closely at what happened month by month.

• Commenting closely followed work posting for most of 2010 with a positive orgy of commenting in December and January. Yay! After January commenting did not quite return to previous 'normal' levels and there are now more comments being made.
• Kudos per month started high and stayed high but with big swings. This probably reflects how easy it is to give kudos – at least we hope so! In this chart the kudos looks a little bit less like a rocket trying to reach escape velocity and we can't wait to run stats for April -will it zig or zag?

Comments, Works and Kudos added per month starting from April 2010

*I suspect the December figure should be higher, given Kudos was introduced in the middle of the month.

'Monthly' charts lets us see comparisons a bit more clearly but 'more comments are being made' can be refined even more if we look at ratios.

• Comments per work has been steadily growing; in fact it appears to have more than doubled in the past year
• April 2010 - 0.80 Comments per Work
• March 2011 - 1.79 Comments per Work
• Kudos per work has now reached 7.31 and almost 4 times as many kudos are given as comments.

Ratio of Comments, Works and Kudos added per month starting from April 2010

It's interesting to observe that the 'Yuletide bump' in the Totals chart says more comments happened in January than December. The Ratios chart tells us that this may be true but the most comments per work happened in December. i.e.: Commenting in December was less prolific but more intense.

We're excited to see that both comments and kudos are continuing to rise on the AO3 - we hope this will continue!

This post written by the lovely Maia :D.

2010 was a wonderful year for the AO3! It was our first full year in Open Beta! We ran two big challenges and lots of smaller ones! We filled up our servers, introduced a bunch of new features, made 1451 code commits and got shout-outs all over the web.

Our team had an eventful year! People moved countries, travelled across continents, changed jobs, got PhDs and had babies. Oh, and we built this great Archive for fandom to enjoy! We feel a great sense of achievement!

We are incredibly grateful to everyone who worked on the Archive during 2010: coders, testers, sysadmins, tag wranglers, support team, designers, and many more!

We're also hugely grateful to all Archive users and members of the OTW for your great feedback, your generous financial contributions (which will pay for beautiful new servers this year), and most importantly, your fannish energy and creations, which are the true heart of the Archive. At the close of 2010 we had:

• 7,927 fandoms
• 11,504 users
• 128,806 works
• 4,949 series
• 591 collections
• 164,450 tags (of which 100,046 are 'canonical' and can be filtered on, 79,294 are character tags, and 45,569 relationship tags)
• 158,639 comments
• 69,153 bookmarks
• 40,299 kudos

We think this is an AMAZING output for just over a year of real usage! GO GO FANDOM!

We're looking forward to seeing what awesome new fannish output 2011 brings! Thanks everyone for your support! Happy New Year!

Today, November 15th, is the first anniversary of the Open Beta launch of the Archive of Our Own! We're totally thrilled to reach this milestone!

Open Beta was the launch of our beautiful Archive into the fannish world at large, and came after two years of intense coding, testing, fundraising, writing of docs, development of policy, and other amazing work. Everyone working on the Archive was super-excited to be able to share the fruits of this work with the rest of fandom, after a year of testing with just a small group of volunteers in Closed Beta.

The results since we launched suggest that fandom loved our shiny work as much as we did! We have expanded faster than we ever dreamed.

When we entered Open Beta on 15 November 2009 we had:

• 347 users


• 668 fandoms


• 6565 works

At the time of writing we have reached:

• 10649 users


• 7757 fandoms


• 116888 works

We're looking forward to seeing our userbase grow and diversify even more - our International Outreach committee have been working hard on the mission of improving the experience for multinational fans. We already have 22 languages represented on the Archive, but we want to see more! (Let Support know if you want to post in a language not represented on that list!)

All this fannish activity filled up our servers quick-smart, so after only one year we're investing in new, much more powerful ones - an investment made possible by the generous support of fandom at large.

We've still got much, much more work to do - Open Beta is, well, beta, and it's been a year of immense change and growth for us. We've learnt a lot about what makes our users happy and we look forward to improving based on all the feedback we've had from fandom. But we're also VERY proud of how much we've achieved so far. Here are a few reflections from staffers on what reaching the first anniversary of Open Beta means to them - do add your thoughts in comments!

Zooey Glass, AD&T Chair

I'm totally amazed and proud of how much work and dedication has gone into this project. I was around last year for Open Beta, and I remember how crazily hard everyone involved was working (I think I still feel exhausted by it). Just this week, I've watched my team sit up all night to test and deploy new code - and then to bugfix when unexpected problems cropped up - and it makes me feel awed and proud. There's so much passion and so much hard work invested in this project.

For me personally, the year since Open Beta has also been about learning - about what kind of features users want, how to communicate with people inside the org and out, how to balance what we want and what we need, and HUGE amounts about servers and code and technical stuff I never dreamed I could understand (I was an English major!). My personal journey also reflects the journey the Archive has taken, and I know everything we have learnt this year will go to make the next year even better. I choke up when I see the feedback we get from users - fandom has supported us not only financially but also by taking the time to say thanks when they see things they enjoy. We're so glad we make you happy, and we really appreciate it when you tell us!

On a practical note, I also LOVE reading on the Archive - so much nommy fic to enjoy!

Helka Lantto, International Outreach member and Finnish translator

My involvement with AO3 has been mostly as a user – as a reader, to be exact. I began reading fic on the Archive after the Open Beta launch, and with time passing, I've come to prefer it to any other archive. True, the code is still in beta, but the Archive shows so much promise that I can't help but love it. In the future, my involvement with the Archive will grow when we get to translate the interface. It'll be a huge undertaking, especially for a small team like Finnish (hint! hint!), but it'll be worth it. It warmed my heart to see that we already have a few fics in Finnish there. Let's hope that with the translation of the interface, we'll get more of them.

Sidra, Systems Co-Chair and AD&T coder

The past two years have been a tremendous learning experience. Those of us in Systems had little to no experience with web applications that receive (during busy times) more than sixty thousand hits per hour, or databases that average two hundred requests per second. And those numbers will just keep climbing. Keeping the servers up and running has been a challenge but the rewards have been huge. Every time I look at the Archive I think, "I helped make this happen". And every time I see something I wish were different (which is, unfortunately, quite often), I know that I can work on making it better.

Enigel, AD&T coder, honorary tester, tag wrangler

I remember the flurry of activity before we launched Open Beta - coding, testing, bug-hunting, performance-testing - and the worries about the best number of invites to hand out per day. There were around 300 users back then, and I can now, when we're at over 10 000, confess that I had some doubts about the worrying itself. I was thinking to myself that it was kind of presumptuous to imagine the hordes of people knocking on our door before we were sure they were indeed going to be that eager, you know? ;)

It was amazing, over the next days, to see people asking for invites, people posting their works, people actually using this thing I had helped build. Every message with praise was a sign we did something good, every message with criticism was a sign that people cared enough to let us know what could be improved, and was a step towards making the Archive better.

10 000 users and 100K works later, I still have that awe and joy at seeing people use the Archive. If you notice something you think could be better, remember: your next support request might become my next coding project! :)

Kristen Murphy, Webmasters chair and tag wrangler

We made this. Once upon a time someone asked, "Can't we do this?" and fandom answered, "YES." That can-do, DIY spirit is one of my favorite things about the Archive. Every time I visit it, whether it's to browse for new works, post a story of my own, or wrangle tags, I think: this is here because a whole lot of fans cared enough to make it happen. The Archive truly is a labor of love. And it isn't only the staff and volunteers who have made it happen, although their efforts have been superheroic — this has been and continues to be a community-wide endeavor. Everyone who offered feedback on the early drafts of the TOS, everyone who's ever submitted a bug report or suggestion, everyone who's donated, everyone who's helped spread the word by posting a story to the Archive and inviting their friends to come and read it — all of these people have made the Archive possible and are helping to make it better, day by day. Thank you.

Rebecca Tushnet, Content Policy chair

I'm pretty sure there are monkeys that know more code than I do, but I'm so pleased to be able to participate in building the Archive by working on policy language that is, we hope, understandable, flexible, and inclusive. What the AO3 means to me is an archive that tries to do things that fans want done in a way that is sustainable in the long term. I have particularly enjoyed seeing tags used in new and exciting ways, combining folksonomy with structured organization. I really admire all the fans who've coded, wrangled, and kept the site up and running, and I look forward to the shiny new servers to make things even better.

Megan Westerby, Archive Support Chair and Development Officer

Stepping into the Support Committee recently I was struck by not only the Archive's fast growth but with how diverse that growth has been. When the Archive went into Open Beta there were 668 fandoms represented -- to have 7757 fandoms just one year later, on servers we own, on a system we built, on an Archive we've invested in -- it's boggling to think where we might be in a year, after video embeds, tagging structure and bookmarking start to make an impact. It's boggling and encouraging. We're building a home and a future and we built it from the foundation up.

The Archive has had an exciting year! We bought shiny, shiny servers (of our own!) in September 2009, allowing us to move out of closed beta and share the wonderful fruits of our coders' and testers' labor with the rest of fandom! Since entering Open Beta on 15 November 2009, we've had a dizzying succession of exciting achievements!

• We've introduced tons of awesome features, both big and small: the ability to backdate a work, new options for bookmarking and reccing, skins, mobile downloads, tools for running collections and challenges, and many, many more!


• We saw two successful challenges run as test cases for our collections code - Yuletide Treasure in December 2009 and Remix Redux in March 2010 - and saw many more wonderful challenges and collections set up home on the Archive, including the Final Fantasy fanworks exchange, the House M.D. Big Bang Challenge, and the LGBT fest.


• We celebrated the first birthday of the servers of our own with a party, cake and lots of fannish creativity!


• We helped set up two new committees in the OTW - Tag Wranglers and Support - who joined Accessibility, Design & Technology in managing the day-to-day work on the Archive!


• On 20 August 2010 we hit 100,000 works on the Archive!


• On 10 October 2010 (10/10/10!) we hit 10,000 registered Archive users!


• We add approximately 150 new users per week (and we have more requests that that - we have to add people slowly so the site can cope).

We have so many more exciting things planned, including art and vid hosting, subscriptions, improved challenge code, more options for bookmarking and reccing, private messages, and better commenting features.

All of this cool stuff is made possible by the collective contribution of fandom, which has come together to code, test, run systems, tag wrangle, provide user support, offer legal advice to help protect the fannish mission of the Archive, and support the AO3 financially through donations to the OTW. Our user numbers grow every day, and the servers of our own are already creaking under the weight of all that fannish passion and creativity. Thanks to the support of our members, we're already able to commit to buying new, more powerful servers (our Systems committee are choosing them RIGHT NOW) - but we need your continuing financial support going forward to keep on extending our infrastructure, and to pay for bandwidth and hosting costs. Just $2 from every Archive member would be enough to pay for our new hardware; we're asking for a US$10 donation. That support will make you an OTW member, with voting privileges. You already have a voice in the future of the AO3 - all users do. But your donation will help us make fandom's dreams a reality.

Make sure fandom can continue to own our own servers! Donate to the OTW now!